


From the First Time We Met

by Kizmet



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Mutual Admiration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-17
Updated: 2019-06-17
Packaged: 2020-05-13 09:19:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19248292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kizmet/pseuds/Kizmet
Summary: Crowley and Aziraphale consider themselves and the other.





	From the First Time We Met

**Crowley**

If anyone had asked him why he’d gone to such lengths to avert the Apocalypse… Well, Crowley had many, many self-serving, acceptably demonic reasons. But in the privacy of his own mind he would have said it was because he’d gone native. In the six thousand years he’d been on Earth he’d grown to like the place, he’d grown to like humans. They could be more gracious than any angel or more evil than any demon (certainly more creatively evil) and he liked them. What’s more it had been HIM who had given them that choice between good and evil and Crowley hated when people; be they angel, demon or human; messed with his stuff, including his gifts.

He would certainly never admit it to his superiors but humans were a- Dare he say it even in his own mind? -A good influence on him. Over the millenniums while he’d watched them something odd had happened to him. He discovered that he quite liked that most demons were too lazy, backward or shortsighted to do anywhere near the harm to humans that they caused to each other. And he learned to dislike seeing it when humans chose to be cruel to one another. He much preferred his own brand of evil that was mostly annoyance leaving humans the option of rising above themselves and NOT passing on the misery to others… As opposed to other demons’ ridiculous fixation on picking on one particular human until the poor thing almost inevitably broke.

“It’s like they’re just looking for a Job,” he’d confided in Aziraphale over a few too many shared pitchers of meade in Orleans while the city was under siege. “I’ll admit there’s a certain appeal to a challenge but have some sense of proportion! There’s being a sore loser and there’s being a bloody moron; I mean can you picture sending _that_ report Down Below? ‘Inflicted leprosy on a guy, killed his flocks, his servants and his kids and he still wouldn’t turn away.’ That had to be embarrassing, not to mention painful, to stack the odds like that and fail anyway.” It wasn’t the sort of thing he’d admit to Aziraphale, no matter how drunk he happened to be, but secretly, privately Crowley liked it when humans used the choice he’d given them to do good… And yet another reason to go for the mass approach: If fifty-one percent of the people he impacted chose to be assholes to someone else in response he could count it a victory.

“I wasn’t about for that one,” Aziraphale had said. “In fact I don’t know that it actually happened, it might be more of an allegory than a historical account. I certainly wouldn’t have let it go so far.”

And Crowley had picked up his glass and clicked it against Aziraphale’s. There was no one else he could picture having their Arrangement with. Because if they’d asked him why _Aziraphale_ had averted the Apocalypse. Crowley’s answer would have depended entirely on who he was speaking with. To his superiors it would be because Crowley had tempted the angel into going against Heaven’s plan. To Aziraphale’s superiors he would have said it was clearly because Aziraphale believed it was the right thing to do; Aziraphale was an angel wasn’t he? By definition he couldn’t do anything he believed to be wrong. To himself though, Crowley knew Aziraphale had done it because right from the beginning Aziraphale had been different, special.

Long before there had been any chance of Aziraphale being influenced by Earth he’d been kind and gentle. Just look at that business with the sword! What other angel would have handed his weapon over to a couple humans so they could protect and warm themselves? Kind and gentle were not words Crowley associated with any other angel. Humans had many accounts of angels as beings of mercy. In Crowley’s opinion, based on six thousand years of watching how angels operated and avoiding being what they operated on that was simply because Aziraphale was much more hands-on with humans and thus an inordinate number of human accounts of interactions with angels were referring to him.

To Crowley, Aziraphale was simply good, good in the way that humans, at their best, were good, good in a way that no other angel came close to approaching… And Aziraphale had always been such.

* * *

 

**Aziraphale**

If anyone had asked him why he’d gone to such lengths to avert the Apocalypse Aziraphale would have told them it was because of Crowley. He knew how his superiors would have taken that statement and how Crowley’s would have and he knew their thoughts would have been remarkably similar despite supposedly being diametrically opposite creatures… And Aziraphale knew both of them would have missed the mark by a mile.

Without Crowley, Aziraphale knew he never would have learned to question himself. Without that he never would have realized that he knew nothing about the Ineffable Plan that he was ostensibly working to serve. And more alarming yet, that his _superiors_ knew nothing about the Ineffable Plan either. They believed, they all believed, that whatever they did it served the plan and, by definition, had to be right because they were angels. Aziraphale feared that he was too close to judge his own actions but he’d seen his brothers and sisters in the Host do things in the cause of all that was good and righteous that did so much harm. Case in point: The recent Almost-Apocalypse. Aziraphale knew, theoretically, that of course it was good for Heaven to finally and irrevocably defeat Hell. Like the rest of the Host, he sincerely believed that the outcome of the battle was a foregone conclusion and Heaven would win. But- but to defeat the adversary at the cost of the destruction of the Earth? Of God’s creation? Could that truly be considered a victory? Aziraphale was, so far as he knew, the only one of the Host to entertain such questions and he knew exactly why.

More than anyone else whom Aziraphale had ever encountered in all of his six thousand years on Earth, Crowley considered the consequences of his actions. Every ‘evil’ deed was weighed down to the nanogram to do just enough harm to keep Crowley out of Hell’s bad books- Or at least beneath their attention as Hell didn’t actually have any other kind of books. It wasn’t precisely the sort of thinking Aziraphale wanted to embrace but it was a near neighbor. 

And whenever he thought that, Aziraphale would end up breaking out in perhaps-more-than-slightly-nervous giggling, because Crowley hadn’t had to tempt him with an apple to impart that, all he’d had to do was ask a question. That one little question that Aziraphale could never get out of his head as he watched humanity warp the sword he’d given them for warmth and protection into the heart of war: Was it truly so bad to know the difference between good and evil? And as the centuries flitted by Aziraphale learned to look, first to see the effects of his actions and then to predict them.

It was all terribly un-Angelic, wholly due to Crowley’s influence and he knew that what both their superiors would have thought of that fact… And Aziraphale knew, to the very core of his essence, regardless of what anyone else might think, that he was better for it. When even Metronon, the very voice of God didn’t actually get the orders he passed on from God but from within himself and simply assumed that whatever he did was according to the Ineffable Plan because, well, it must be mustn’t it? Well, perhaps it was time _someone_ considered that, maybe just maybe, it was part of the Ineffable Plan to consider the consequences of one’s actions.

And if, sometimes, Azariphale wondered why Crowley fell and if sometimes he feared it was because Crowley had a knack for asking questions just a tad too spot on… Well he locked the thought away and buried it alongside the realization that he didn’t care for winning if it came at the cost of _Crowley_ losing.


End file.
